‘I wish they’d apologize’: Walmart kidnap suspect recounts ordeal
Mahendra “Mick” Patel had no idea his life was about to implode, that he was to become a monster who tried to snatch a toddler from a mother’s arms in an Acworth Walmart.
It was March 21, Friday evening rush hour, and Patel was driving his pickup truck on Cobb Parkway. He noticed three police cars closing in behind him and figured they were after someone. They were.
Soon an officer pointed a gun at him, yelling to put his hands up and then: “Get on the ground!”
Patel was handcuffed as hundreds of curious motorists rolled by. “What did I do?” he kept asking.
A 56-year-old Indian immigrant and U.S. citizen, Patel recounted his ordeal to me Thursday from the dining room table of his Cobb County home. A day earlier, prosecutors dropped attempted kidnapping and other charges against him.
Patel was driven to Acworth P.D. after his arrest. A sergeant in street clothes entered the interrogation room, the “good cop” in the scenario, and started inquiring about a trip Patel made three nights earlier to a nearby Walmart.
Patel went there to buy Tylenol for his 86-year-old mother who lives with him. He asked a customer named Caroline Miller, who was driving a disabled cart with her two young children, where was the Tylenol. She pointed.
“She was stopping and going, like she didn’t know how to drive it,” Patel recalled telling the cop. “The kid started to fall, so I reached out to stop him. She resisted, so I let go.”
Credit: WSB-TV
(Miller is not disabled. Her kids like to ride on the cart, she has said.)
Patel told the detective that an employee then took him to the drug aisle, then he passed Miller again, “showed her the Tylenol and she gave me the thumbs-up.”
After recounting his story, Patel was handcuffed and told he was under arrest.
“For what?!?” he asked. Again.
Unbeknownst to Patel, Miller told police he had tried to yank her young son from her arms.
Patel kept telling Acworth police his wife and two daughters were out of state and that his elderly mother was home alone. He had also missed taking his medication for high blood pressure. He started fretting.
The retired engineer and father of two was taken to Cobb’s jail, but guards would not process him because of his skyrocketing blood pressure. Instead, he spent the next couple hours handcuffed to a bed in a nearby hospital.
Back at jail, Patel sat up all night and, sometime before dawn, was handed a warrant with his charges: assault, battery and the one that terrified him — kidnapping.
Word trickled out in jail concerning his arrest.
“A new guy came into the dome (lockup),” Patel recalled. “He said: ‘That’s the guy. I saw him on TV. He kidnapped a kid.’
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
“That’s when I realized, they don’t take this lightly. My life is in danger.”
Thankfully, two inmates, named Robert and Michael, a sturdy guy familiar with being locked up, believed Patel and watched out for him.
Soon, a gang member approached: “Hey, old man, what if I bring you into the bathroom and beat the hell out of you?”
Patel told the menacing man he would not fight back. He was terrified because the beds were all out in the open and someone could stab him while he slept. Then again, he wasn’t sleeping much.
He asked attorney Ashleigh Merchant to represent him. He had seen her on TV and was impressed with how she torpedoed the RICO case against Donald Trump in Fulton County. He wanted someone aggressive to fight for him.
Patel asked Merchant to get him transferred to solitary confinement. But, he said, she pushed back, worried for his mental health in there.
Credit: Contributed
Also, she sensed the tide was about to change. She had received the Walmart security videos — 20 of them, 10 hours worth. Merchant distributed a video to the media demonstrating there was no attempted kidnapping.
It went viral. “Global,” his wife, Alpa, says.
It was becoming clear both Acworth police and Cobb District attorney’s office, run by the newly elected Sonya Allen, had screwed up. Or had rushed the case. Or just didn’t care.
Those were Merchant’s observations. And mine, too, after I watched all 20 videos. In mid-April, I wrote, “If I was a juror, there’s no way I’d convict him of attempted kidnapping.”
It was that bad. Acworth police, in their initial Facebook post after his arrest, said Patel had “fled” the scene.
Instead, the videos showed the opposite.
After the attempted “snatching,” Patel wandered past Miller, found an employee, passed by her again with the employee and then showed the mom the Tylenol. He then waited at two different checkouts, paid with his credit card, stopped to talk to an employee at the door and then dawdled to his truck.
It was the most slow-motioned escape ever.
Merchant says police knew of these tapes immediately. She said they sat in the Walmart security room that night watching them with Miller. Later, she said, a detective watched them before they arrested Patel in the Cobb Parkway takedown three days later.
Credit: Steve Schaefer /
Acworth police issued a statement saying “investigators thoroughly reviewed the information provided, conducted interviews, and collected evidence.” Police said a judge determined there was probable cause for an arrest warrant, adding the DA got an indictment from a grand jury.
Merchant says the cop lied in obtaining the kidnapping warrant, saying Patel pulled the kid away from his mom. That never happened, and officials later reduced the charge to attempted kidnapping.
DA Allen issued some gobbledygook, saying her office is “pleased to have facilitated a resolution and is encouraged by the willingness of both parties to engage in a constructive dialogue.
“We remain committed to pursuing justice in a manner that promotes accountability, restoration, and community healing whenever possible.”
Once the tapes went public in mid-April, the atmosphere inside jail changed for Patel. Prisoners who had earlier menaced him, approached and apologized, he said. “I’m sorry,” one told him. “We got you wrong.”
“Guys were yelling, ‘Patel, we’re with you!’” he recalled. He said his jail buddy, Mike, joked: “`You’re a celebrity in jail.’”
Still, that wasn’t enough for prosecutors. Weeks later, in early May and after 45 days in lockdown, Chief Assistant DA Jesse Evans, who until late last year had been Acworth’s police chief (yes, read that statement again), fought hard to keep Patel in jail without bond.
The prosecutor objected to the video being shown at the hearing. The judge, thankfully, waved him off and released Patel on $10,000 bond.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Allen issued a statement that day saying her office was “committed to the protection of children.”
But it seemed they were merely committed to saving face — for her office and Acworth police. Merchant filed a motion for a speedy trial, forcing prosecutors to try the case by the end of August or drop it.
Patel was adamant. He told his lawyers, “Either the DA drops it or we go to trial. I have full faith in you guys.”
“It got to the point that I don’t care,” he said. “It’s not about me anymore, I’ve got to tell people. ‘I didn’t chicken out.’”
This week, with the trial looming, the DA’s office blinked. It was either punt now or get very publicly laughed out of court.
“I wish they’d apologize,” Patel said. “That they’d own up to it.”
Patel and Merchant declined to go into whether there is a civil trial in their future, concerning false arrest or malicious prosecution. She said her law partner and husband, John Merchant, and Patel “are going to have to figure that out.”
Then she laughed and said: “I think you know my vote.”
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
